Summit Wireless Hoping for 4-5 More Dedicated WiSA Stores for Holidays

The Wireless Speaker and Audio Association’s focus shift last year from the technical standard to a consumer-facing organization is paying off, said Summit Wireless CEO Brett Moyer on the company’s Tuesday Q2 earnings call. Visitors to the WiSA website have grown from 26,000 to 360,000, to what it expects to be 2 million visitors by year-end.

Revenue for the quarter ended June 30 grew to $1.6 million vs. $300,000 in the year-ago quarter, the company reported. Net loss was $3.4 million, flat with Q2 2020. Full-year 2021 revenue guidance is projected to be $6.5 million-$7 million vs. $2.4 million in 2020. Shares dropped 5.5% Tuesday to close at $3.60.

Moyer highlighted the WiSA store at Amazon, a designated spot for WiSA-certified TVs, speakers and transmitters sold by Amazon. The company expects the WiSA Association storefront initiative to expand to four or five resellers in time for the holiday shopping season, allowing consumers to mix and match brands and purchase bundles, Moyer said.

The CEO highlighted WiSA SoundSend technology as a universal, low-cost path to get “full cinema sound” from a smart TV. Many over-the-top video services are streaming high-resolution, multichannel audio, he said. TV makers can certify that they’re SoundSend-compatible, which lets consumers know they can download an app for the TV, “and the TV turns into an effective AV receiver.”

Under the WiSA Wave campaign, WiSA is making its consumer data analytics from its website available to certified resellers, said Moyer. That includes information about geography, time spent on the site and customers’ searches for high- or low-priced systems. “If you have two brands of TVs, two brands of speakers and you want to create a WiSA storefront, we’ll also make available that data, those analytics,” he said. They can also use the data to market directly to consumers, he said.

WiSA created the Platin audio brand “to create a bigger category for all consumers,” Moyer said. The Enclave is a “great mainstream” and high-performance product, he said, and audiophiles with bigger budgets have other options in the WiSA family, but “we can go out and market a great-sounding system for $800-$900,” he said: “We wanted to create that entry point for the WiSA ecosystem with Platin.”

On WiSA’s second-generation plans, Moyer said Summit plans to bring out a 5-GHz version with more than four channels that works with smart TVs and speakers, tablets, headphones and smartphones. It’s currently marketing 2.4-GHz chips for sound bars. The first-generation product is targeted to the top third of the market, “but when you look at 270,000 smart TVs being shipped,” he said, a lower cost transmitter than the SoundSend could result in 30% share for the entire market. Overall, Moyer sees a total available market opportunity of 650 million devices, not counting headphones and smart speakers.